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This game allows understanding how the brain can adapt when the sensory channels are altered. In this case, the visual rays are deviated by the prismatic glasses and the sensory-motor coordination undergoes its effects. The brain needs time and evidence to adapt to this change, falling into several errors before completely recalibrating the movement of the arms and hands from the distorted view.

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How can we guess which action a person is miming in darkness? With this activity, we will discover how simple it is to understand both gestures and emotions in the dark if you attach few phosphorescent balls on the body of our mime. Thanks to this capacity of our brain, we are able to distinguish an inanimate object from an animate one since the first months of life.

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The communication of a message seems slightly simple when using principally one sense, but what happens when each of us uses a different sense? This activity aims to show that more senses we use, more likely it is that the final addressee will get a diverse message from the original! This phenomenon happens because every sense is devoted to a specific task: for example, vision is specialized in perceiving objects position in space whereas hearing is specialized in distinguishing fast music from slow music. Therefore, when we want to use our hearing to understand where objects are in a room, the task will become more difficult and communication gets worse.

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In this activity, the child is asked to recognize different objects by touching them blindfolded or with the use of blurry glasses (see dedicated video). This task, apparently trivial, can be very difficult when the sensory channel of touch is compromised. To do this, you can use gloves of different thickness. The increase of thickness reduces the tactile sensory capacity, which makes perception less precise and therefore more prone to errors.

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This activity allows us to understand that sometimes our brain deceives us so that we feel what we are not actually experiencing. For example, it is possible that a rubber hand seems to belong to our body just because the brain sees it moving like our real hand. The authors who have discovered this illusion said "the hands feel what the eyes see".

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This video shows how to build a pair of blurry glasses. The blurry vision recreates an effect known in the scientific literature as the Ganzfeld effect: vision can perceive the reality thanks to the different distribution of light in the space, if the light is uniformly distributed, then the visual perception gets worse. This simple object makes this concept clear in a practical and funny way. The blurry glasses can be used in different activities to understand how the sight, even if present, is not enough to carry out daily activities. Try them also with the basketball game!

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In this video, we created an object that allows us to study the perception of verticality. The concept of verticality corresponds to the direction of gravity. Although verticality can be correctly perceived when we are standing, we can face perceptual errors when lying on one side. These errors depend on how our brain codes the verticality in the most frequent situations, which is when we are standing or sitting. In fact, the brain assumes that the body is more often in a standing position and therefore parallel to gravity. On the other hand, when we are lying on one side, we are in an unusual position and the perceptual system tends to recognize verticality as more tilted towards the body thus making a mistake.

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In this video, we present three activities where movements sonification technologies are used to support mathematics understanding.

In the first, we show how to create angles by moving the arms. Different angles are associated to different musical notes: sounds with high pitch are used to sonify acute angles and sound with low pitch for obtuse angles. In the second, we used the mathematical relationship between rhythmic patterns performed by hands clapping and fractions. In the third, the fraction becomes the user’s body: the openings of arms and legs controls numerator and denominator of the fraction, respectively

English

The video shows the activities developed by the weDRAW partners of Infomus Lab-Casa Paganini (University of Genoa). These activites take advantange of motion capture systems, auditory and visual systems to support teaching fractions, proportions and angles.

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